Can you please discuss the poem "Desert Places," by Robert Frost?

The title of Robert Frost’s poem “Desert Places” is
particularly intriguing. We normally think of “desert places” as vast areas of dry sand
baked under the blistering heat of the sun.  We think of such places as treeless,
without vegetation, and dead. The title of the poem is a bit ironic, then, considering
that Frost’s speaker describes a small, snow-covered field surrounded by trees that are
perhaps themselves tinged with snow. Thus the word “desert,” in the title of Frost’s
poem, seems to refer to places of emptiness – a connotation important when interpreting
the end of the poem.

The poem begins by describing a kind
of change not associated with vitality and energy (as change often is) but rather with
the opposite: “Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast” (1). The quickly falling
snow and descending night will soon cover the field so that it will soon bear few if any
traces of life or movement. At present the field is not entirely blanketed; instead, the
speaker observes

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. . . the ground almost covered smooth in
snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
(3-4)

The surrounding woods
seem to engulf the field, while any animals living there
are

now “smothered in their lairs” (6).  The word
“smothered,” of course, suggests a kind of death, but now the poem shifts its focus from
the field and its inhabitants to the observing
speaker:

I am
too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me
unawares.

Now the poem
becomes not merely an observation of external nature but a meditation on the nature of
the speaker. The landscape looks lonely and thereby provokes in him (or reminds him of)
a personal loneliness within himself.  Notice that the speaker does not call himself
“absent-minded” (a familar cliché) but rather “absent-sprited.” To be absent-spirited is
a far deeper and potentially more disturbing condition than to be “absent-spirited.” To
be “absent-spirited” may suggest some loss of interest in life itself, or at least in
the details of life one presently faces.

By the time we
reach the third stanza, anything the speaker says about the field seems to reflect as
well on his own state of mind:

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And lonely as it is that
loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be
less--

A blanker whiteness of benighted
snow

With no expression, nothing to express.
(9-12)

Notice how the
phrasing of this stanza is full of repetitions, such as the repetitions of “lonely,”
“loneliness,” and “lonely” again, as well as the echoes of l’s,
o’s, n’s, and s’s in
those words – sounds which are variously picked up and echoed in such later words as
“less,” “snow,” “no,” and “nothing.” Similar repetition occurs in “whiteness” and
“benighted,” so that the effect of the entire stanza is almost a bit claustrophobic,
even if highly musical.

In the final stanza, the speaker
makes explicit what was earlier only implied: he is more afraid of the loneliness he
feels within than of any mere external emptiness in nature. Perhaps he himself fears a
kind of metaphorical, symbolic smothering by a kind of darkness, coldness, and
loneliness in his own absent spirit.